More Facts on the Relation Between Mass Killings and Mind-Altering Drugs

Here are some further facts relevant to the discussion here on the influence of mind-altering drugs (illegal and legal)  in terror outrages and other rampage killings in Europe and North America:

I have just heard a German official say on BBC TV that the Ansbach suicide bomber had been in trouble with the authorities several times over drug offences. On the written web, this link http://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/24/world/ansbach-germany-blast/ quotes Joachim Herrmann, Bavaria���s Interior Minister, as saying:

���The bomber was known to police in Ansbach for previous offenses, including drug crimes, Herrmann said. He had also twice attempted suicide before the bombing.���

Reports this morning noted that a Syrian who slashed a woman to death with a machete in Reutlingen, near Stuttgart, was likewise known to the police for ���assault and drug-related crimes���(my emphasis). 

We have also now learned that Ali David Sonboly, the German-Iranian Munich rampage killer,  ���spent two months in a psychiatric hospital being ���treated���(presumably drugged) for depression and anxiety. One report said ���It is not known if he had been taking medication he had been prescribed���. Nor has there been any information about illegal drugs (would anyone be surprised, given his age and lifestyle?), though an initial flurry about ���gun-control��� died down after it was revealed that Sonboly had got round Germany���s already ostensibly rather strict gun laws by buying a Glock pistol on the ���dark web���. So much ( as usual) for ���gun control���, which in practice is much more of a slogan than a fact.

I have as yet found no information to suggest drug use by the Wurzburg train attacker - not that this shows he was not a drug user, only that nobody has yet found out if he is, or even tried to do so.This also remains the case with the Dallas killer, Micah Johnson, whose case has now been more or less forgotten . 

 

Indeed the German authorities, who have their (Islamic) explanation of the Wurzburg episode already*, may not be interested in pursuing the matter further. The Wurzburg attacker, Riaz Khan Ahmadzai, aka Muhammad Riyad, was  a 17-year old alleged Afghan (though he may have been Pakistani)  who went wild on a train with a knife and a hatchet. He is now dead, as most such attackers are either by their own hands or at the hands of the police. The Thalys train assailant is a rare exception, and we���ve heard little of him lately). So he cannot be asked his motives. *There have been claims, as yet not confirmed, that he had displayed Islamic affiliations.  There are also pictures of him wearing a rather non-Islamic pink wig at a music festival.

We are already well aware of the Nice mass-murderer���s (Mohammed Lahouaiej Bouhlel) use of drugs, including marijuana and of him also having been ���depressed��� and having been in psychiatric ���care���. He was also known as a petty criminal, thug and thief, but not as a terrorist or fanatic, though there are now attempts by the French authorities to claim that he was a) radicalised in the last weeks of his life and b) involved a plot supposedly hatched many months before, which are contradictory. Let us see what happens when his alleged accomplices come to court.

 

Claims that he shouted ���Allahu Akhbar��� during his crimes, made routinely now on every one of these occasions, are in serious dispute.

 

We also know, thanks his wife���s testimony and to a post mortem, that Omar Mateen, the rampage killer in Orlando, was (like Anders Breivik and the British rampage killer Raoul Moat) on steroids. For those interested in such details, Breivik (by his own account, without which we would not know)  took a substance called Stanozolol, together with the amphetamine analogue ephedrine.

 

I do not think my case for an inquiry into the apparent correlation between drug use and such actions is any weaker following these events.